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  Charlie, Becky and I then wandered into the kitchen to discover that Dad and Mrs Brooks had formed a team. Mrs Brooks was rustling up a Stilton sauce to pour over steamed vegetables, while Dad was putting together some individual broccoli tartlets. Mrs Brooks was really rather impressed.

  Indeed, while we were eating supper she said that if he was looking for work, she often needed help with some of her bigger catering jobs. Dad said he was very flattered but he’d have to go away and think about it.

  Over a dessert of pears in chocolate custard Mum asked Becky whether she was going to ring Craterface. Except she called him Terry because she was in a good mood because we weren’t dead. And Becky said she’d be happy if she never saw the lying skunk again. Which was probably just as well since we’d left the Moto Guzzi in Scotland.

  Then there was a loud pop! and Dr Brooks appeared carrying champagne and a tray of seven glasses. He filled them, we raised them, Dad said, “Welcome home,” and Charlie sank his glass in one go and let out one of the loudest burps I have ever heard in my life.

  ∨ Boom! ∧

  18

  A bunker under the brecon beacons

  School on Monday morning was particularly excellent. For obvious reasons. When your headmistress stands up in assembly and says you were kidnapped by two of your teachers, but you escaped and they’re now on the run from the police, a party atmosphere continues pretty much unabated for the rest of the week.

  We were officially cooler than any other pupils in living memory, and I reckoned it was probably a good month before any teacher would feel confident enough to give either of us a detention.

  Dad decided to take the job with Charlie’s mum. He stuck it for three whole weeks. That was about his limit. She was terrifying, so Dad said. During one particularly stressful wedding reception she did her breadboard-throwing thing. He was inches away from a visit to Accident and Emergency.

  Luckily, he was offered a more lucrative and less dangerous job in the Grand Café in town, so he was able to stop working for Mrs Brooks without incurring her everlasting wrath. Even more luckily, the job in the Grand Café was part-time so he was able to come home and cook us beef Wellington and stuffed butternut squash.

  The police never came back. I told Charlie something fishy was going on but he told me to chill out and be grateful we weren’t taken into custody and injected with truth serum.

  So I tried to chill out. And I was doing it really well till we were playing five-a-side football during the lunch break one day a couple of weeks later and I looked across the road and saw a black car with smoked-glass windows parked in front of the laundrette. I didn’t tell Charlie. He’d just say I was paranoid.

  The following day I saw it when I was standing on the balcony after supper. It pulled into the car park, idled for a few minutes, then drove away again.

  I told Charlie this time. He said I was seeing things. Then we had a class outing to the Science Museum and the black car with the smoked windows was sitting at the side of the street when we got back into the coach. I went a bit crazy at this point. It took Mrs Hennessy a good ten minutes to calm me down and even Charlie said I might have a point.

  A few evenings later we met up in the little playground opposite the flats. We sat side by side on the swings. It was getting dark. The orange streetlamps were coming on one by one and the windows in the tower block were lighting up in a chequerboard of different colours.

  We were talking about our big secret.

  Charlie said, “Don’t you wish you could tell someone? I mean, we could be rich, we could be famous, we could be interviewed by the world’s most respected scientists. We could go down in history.” He paused. “Except of course we wouldn’t. Because no one would believe us. We’d probably end up in a psychiatric hospital.”

  “Unless we had proof,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “Unless we had proof.”

  “Like this, for example,” I said, digging into the back pocket of my jeans and pulling out the floaty balls.

  “God,” said Charlie. “I remember those. Do they still work?”

  I placed two of them in the air and let go. They hung there, completely motionless. “Those are yours,” I said. “I’ve got three others. They’re, like, a souvenir.”

  “Cheers,” said Charlie, sweeping the two balls out of the air and pocketing them.

  And that’s when I saw the figure emerging from the shadows beneath the trees. My insides froze. “Charlie…?”

  “Oh crap,” he said. “This is not good, is it?”

  I wanted to jump off the swing and run but my legs were no longer taking messages.

  The silhouetted figure got closer. “Hello, James. Hello, Charles.”

  It was Mrs Pearce. She was wearing clothes she must have found in a skip. A black plastic raincoat with one sleeve missing. Sandals. Fluorescent-orange workman’s trousers. She looked as if she’d washed her hair in engine oil.

  “You were probably expecting me, weren’t you?”

  “No,” said Charlie, in a wobbly voice. “I mean, actually, Jimbo was. But I wasn’t.”

  “You destroyed my life. You destroyed everything,” she said. “And do you know what?”

  “What?” asked Charlie.

  “I have absolutely nothing left to lose.”

  “Really?” said Charlie.

  I could see now that Mrs Pearce was holding two objects. In her left hand was a large hammer. In her right was a small pointy gardening fork.

  “Now hang on,” said Charlie. “I think we should talk about this. You know, sensibly. Like grown-ups.”

  “Shut up,” said Mrs Pearce. “I’m going to kill you.”

  I looked over her shoulder. The black car with the smoked-glass windows was parked in front of the flats. The driver’s door was standing open.

  “And I’m going to enjoy it so very, very much,” said Mrs Pearce.

  There was movement in the darkness behind her. Two more figures were emerging from the trees. Their clothing was dark and their faces were in shadow. But I could see that they were men. Big men.

  Mrs Pearce took a couple more steps and raised the hammer above her head. I screamed and fell off the back of the swing and banged my head on the rubberized tarmac. Mrs Pearce lunged and there was a flash of light and a loud crack! and she slumped on top of me, the hammer narrowly missing my head.

  I pushed her off and struggled to my feet. There was a feathered dart sticking out of her bottom and she was saying, “Nnnnrrrrgg…”

  “Gordon Bennett,” said Charlie.

  The two men were walking towards us. They had guns. It seemed like a good idea not to run away. The man on the left bent down, yanked the dart out of Mrs Pearce’s bottom, rolled her over and fitted her with a black plastic muzzle. The man on the right walked up to us and said, “Jimbo…Charlie…”

  He held out his hand and we shook it, robotically, unable to do anything else.

  “Who are you?” asked Charlie.

  “We’re the good guys,” said the man. He was wearing a suit but he had an Action Man scar across his cheek and his head was shaved like he’d just returned from a war.

  His colleague hoisted Mrs Pearce easily over his shoulder and carried her towards the park gate.

  “What’s going on?” asked Charlie.

  “We reckoned if we stuck close to you she’d show up sooner or later,” said the man. “Use you as bait.”

  “Bait?” I said.

  “There’s a couple more still at large in the Peak District but we’ll track them down in the next couple of days. I don’t think you’ve got much to worry about.”

  Neither Charlie nor I could think of anything to say.

  “Well,” said the man, “we just wanted to thank the two of you. You got there before us. Job well done. We’d give you medals. But medals mean publicity. And we don’t like publicity in the department.”

  “What department’s that?”

  The man looked at Charlie as
if he were very, very stupid.

  “So, um…” said Charlie. “What are you going to do with her? Mrs Pearce, I mean.”

  “She’ll be in a disused nuclear bunker several hundred metres under the Brecon Beacons.” The man paused. “Of course, I may be lying.” He held out his hand towards me. “Floaty balls, please.”

  “What?”

  “Floaty balls.”

  Reluctantly, I slipped my hand into my trouser pocket, took out my three balls and placed them in his hand. He looked over at Charlie. “Yours too.”

  Across the car park I saw his colleague dump Mrs Pearce’s unconscious body into the boot of the car, slam it shut, then climb into the driver’s seat.

  Charlie handed over the final two balls. The man took his hand away and let all five balls hang motionless for a second. “God, I love these things.” Then he swept them out of the air and slipped them into his jacket pocket.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Charlie nervously. “Are you, like, going to wipe our brains or something? You know, so we don’t remember anything.”

  “You’ve been watching too many films, Charlie. No. It’s much simpler than that. If you say anything, to anyone, we track you down and kill you.”

  “Right,” said Charlie.

  “It’s been good meeting you,” said the man. “I hope you have a pleasant evening.”

  He turned and walked through the gate at the edge of the park. He got into the black car with the smoked-glass windows, slammed the door and drove off into the night.

  EOF

 

 

  Mark Haddon, Boom!

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

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